Doing New Things with Virtual Reality

Virtual reality isn’t a new idea by any means, and is a staple of science fiction and especially of cyberpunk. So maybe at least it’s an idea decades old… The thought seems to go towards just replicating life, and maybe doing something you otherwise couldn’t. It moves into deeper science fiction when people start living their lives vicariously through their virtual reality selves.

But now that we’re starting to really have some virtual reality available – and the fascinating idea of the simple setups that just hold up your smart phone for the picture – I think that the true idea generating and innovation has begun.

At least, that’s the feeling I had watching Good Mythical Morning this morning, as Rhett and Link used virtual reality to confront Link’s fears and see about them not being as bad as his mind thinks. It gets sillier when Link then uses it to basically go all horror-movie on Rhett… and then gets cute when they use it to interact with Rhett’s dog. But rather than just tell you, here’s the video:

The confronting the fears element, in particular, feels like a really interesting and potentially amazing use of the technology. Well, the second bit seems like it will be the plot of a horror movie before too long. And the last bit is probably just something that’s going to happen.

But this also reminded me of some stories we’ve been hearing about virtual being used – and effective – in physical therapy (like in this story: http://www.inc.com/aj-agrawal/how-virtual-reality-will-change-physical-therapy-forever.html). And that’s cool. It’s also interesting in comparison to the science fiction: in the stories, we move towards virtual reality and our physical bodies get worse. But this is a case of using the virtual reality to make our bodies better.

What else do you think we’ll be able to do with virtual reality here soon? Let me know in the comments below!

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